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Aprisma Delivers SPECTRUM Business Service Intelligence Solution

Aprisma Management Technologies Inc, a Gores Technology Group Company, announced immediate availability of the SPECTRUM Business Service Intelligence (BSI) Solution. SPECTRUM BSI delivers cost-effective service management, performance reporting, application response time monitoring, system management and network management. Backed by a 30-day on time, on budget implementation guarantee, Aprisma's new business service management solution can demonstrate a return on investment in less than 90 days.

SPECTRUM BSI understands the relationships and impact of IT infrastructure on business services and leverages Aprisma's Technology Relationship Mapping, impact analysis, and root cause analysis to enable customers to evolve their IT organizations from being tactically reactive to strategically proactive -- all while improving IT service quality from a customer and business perspective. Business service definition and on-going maintenance issues are eased through automation while asset, availability, change management, performance and utilization reporting validates service level agreement compliance.

"Defining IT services in alignment with business objectives will help IT departments remain competitive," Gartner's research vice president, Debra Curtis, explained. "Gartner defines in our IT Management Process Maturity Model five levels of increasing sophistication and competency that IT departments must move toward to increase efficiency and effectiveness in managing IT infrastructure as a business service. Customers should seek vendors whose solutions can help them understand, validate and articulate the availability, performance and impact of IT infrastructure on their business services."

"There is significant discussion in the industry today around ways to better align IT with business operations, while still meeting the need for on-demand capacity and performance," said Aprisma President and CEO Mike Fabiaschi. "SPECTRUM BSI delivers a practical, achievable, rapid way for customers to manage their IT infrastructures as business services in alignment with ITIL and NGOSS best practices."

Integrated Analytics, Technology Relationship Mapping And Condition Correlation Technology

SPECTRUM BSI is able to predict and prevent problems, prioritize response efforts based on impacted customers or services, and produce reports that verify and validate the quality of delivered services while also pinpointing the root cause of network, system or application performance and availability issues. Aprisma's integrated, adaptive analytics communicate bi-directionally with thousands of multi-vendor, multi-technology IT components to identify, verify, and solve complex problems using model-based, rule-based and policy- based correlation engines.

Utilizing patented Technology Relationship Mapping, SPECTRUM BSI intuitively understands physical and logical relationships between infrastructure components, as well as the critical services and customers they are designed to support. Technology Relationship Mapping bridges the gaps between the NOC, data center, and service desk by relating network components, servers, and applications together into logical services, business processes and customer departments (e.g., e-mail, invoicing and finance).

Advanced new Condition Correlation Technology (CCT) defines relationships and interdependencies between seemingly unrelated events, components or other objects. For example, CCT automatically identifies loss of redundancy and diminished capacity, while automatically prioritizing issues based on affected customers or services to generate real-time alarms that warn of impending SLA violations.

Service Management

SPECTRUM BSI correlates SPECTRUM's knowledge of the IT infrastructure to guarantee the integrity of SLAs by:

At-a-Glance Service Dashboard

SPECTRUM BSI provides an at-a-glance understanding of how well business services are running through actionable information delivered to executives, service owners, and customers. The Web-based dashboard is built on the SPECTRUM OneClick architecture for easy access, distribution and administration.

Service Compliance Reports

In addition to real-time business service management, SPECTRUM BSI provides historical data through Web-based reports for both services and SLAs to ensure that they meet the needs of the customers as well as the service providers.

Performance Reporting

SPECTRUM BSI offers a comprehensive solution with out-of-the box reports that unlock actionable information and enable the ability to easily create ad- hoc reports, while validating the accuracy of all report data. Availability reports ensure IT investment decisions are supported by factual information. Asset inventory reports can deliver a 30 percent capital expense reduction during the first year and 5-10 percent in on-going operational savings by understanding asset utilization and reallocation opportunities. Change management reports track when deployed assets are added or removed while verifying that changes were authorized and purposeful. Performance, capacity planning, and trend analysis reports enable customers to:

Application Response Time Management

The need to effectively integrate fault and performance management is becoming increasingly apparent to IT organizations seeking to ensure IT service quality. A slow application is a broken application from the perspective of the end user. SPECTRUM BSI delivers proactive measurement, baseline, threshold and trend performance of networks, servers, or applications by leveraging multi-vendor response time measurement capabilities already deployed within the IT infrastructure. Intelligent, automated discovery and configuration of performance test points within the infrastructure yields rapid return on investment by quickly finding and fixing the cause of end-to-end performance problems.

System Management

SPECTRUM BSI offers intelligent integration with BMC, CA, Concord, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NetIQ, and Sun Microsystems systems management solutions. Customers can also leerage SPECTRUM's support for the Host Resources MIB (RFC 2790) to monitor server CPU, memory, disk, I/O, installed software and running application processes. If a critical application process fails, or fails to initialize, SPECTRUM will generate an alarm and notify the appropriate operations staff. Application log files and syslog information can also be analyzed for problem conditions.

Network Management

Whether it is on-demand, adaptive, autonomic, mainframe, client-server, distributed, Grid or Web services computing -- none of it works without the network. Competing business service management solutions lack granular visibility and analytics of the network infrastructure. In simple terms, not only does SPECTRUM BSI tell you that you have a problem-it also tells you what caused the problem, who and what is impacted, where to find it, and how to fix it. Able to manage networks across the hall or around the world, SPECTRUM BSI delivers granular Layer 2 and Layer 3 visibility down to the individual port and circuit for multi-vendor, multi-technology LAN and WAN, wired and wireless, and physical and virtual networks. Aprisma offers specific management applications that drill down to monitor and analyze ATM, Frame Relay, IP Multicast, MPLS and VPN networks.